Brown Sugar Peach Cobbler

Old-fashioned brown sugar peach cobbler is the perfect, simple dessert you should be making for the July 4th holiday. A Cobbler is a dessert consisting of a fruit (every so often, they can be savory) filling poured into a large baking dish and covered with a batter, biscuit, or at times, dumpling, before being baked. Let’s face it, it does not get much easier than this.

Cobblers are actually called by various other names such as; pandowdy, grunt, slump, buckles, crisp, croustade, bird’s nest pudding , and crow’s nest pudding.  They are all simple variations of cobblers, and each is based on seasonal fruits and berries, or whatever fresh ingredients are available.

Cobblers, Crisps & Crumbles

Cobblers have been around in America the longest. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, cobblers date back to the 1850s. By the mid-19th century, it had become the dish we know best; fruit baked in the oven with a dough top.

Crisps and crumbles are extremely similar. A crisp is a dessert consisting of fruit baked with a crumble topping that first appeared in America around the early 1900s. The topping that sits on the baked fruit in a crisp is typically crispy and crumbly, containing butter, sugar, but sometimes additional things like flour, oatmeal, or nuts. Crisps often have a pebbly texture.

Crumbles are essentially crisp but can have a slightly different topping texture. The topping of a crumble tends to be sandier in texture than a crunchy crisp, or it can have big clumps rather than an equally distributed crisp topping.

Peach cobblers have long been popular in the South. American settlers invented the peach cobbler because they didn’t have the proper ingredients or tools to make peach pie. So instead, they stewed peaches, placed raw biscuit dough on top, and cooked the cobbler over an open flame.

Peach Cobbler Fun Facts

• National Peach Cobbler Day is April 13. The day was created in the 1950s by the Georgia Peach Festival to promote the sale of canned peaches.
• Fresh peaches make the best cobblers and are at their peak when picked mid to late summer.
• The “cobbler” gets its name because the dough looks so rough, it’s as if it’s been cobbled together.
• Peach cobbler recipes actually vary regionally, some have an additional bottom crust resembling a more traditional pie.
• The world’s heaviest peach was 1.8 pounds and grown in Peach County, Georgia, in July 2018.
• The largest peach cobbler was on display at the Georgia Peach Festival in 2007. The cobbler was 11 feet x 5 feet, 8 inches deep, and used 75 gallons of peaches.

Peach cobblers are a quintessential summer dessert that can accompany just about any meal. They are also a great pie alternative. Cobblers are best enjoyed warm, right after it’s baked with a generous scoop of your favorite vanilla ice cream.